Thursday, August 06, 2009

Taser Nation

by digby

This one's especially interesting. A baseball fan is drunk and apparently belligerent (clearly the first time in history such a thing has happened. )The police are called to remove him. He argues with the cops for a little over 30 seconds and then it happens:

Since tasers were supposed to be a replacement for deadly force, I can only assume that in the past drunken baseball fans were shot dead for arguing with police. There must be quite a body count.

You can hear the the electrical sparking of the taser and it's familiar enough to me that I got sick to my stomach at the mere sound --- there are audible gasps on the track. It's an interesting Pavlovian response which I woud imagine will be fully absorbed into the collective American psyche before too long.

This gentleman, we'll call him Belligerent Santa, was clearly not happy about something going on at the A's game last night. (A YouTube commenter who claims to have been sitting near where the incident took place said it was a loud Texas fan who was yelling inappropriately and got angry when he was asked to quiet down. Judging from how few people were around him, that doesn't really sound like much of a stretch.) After what seemed like a decent amount of time trying to reason with Belligerent Santa, the jig was up, and like that scene from The Hangover, they had to unleash the full power of the Taser.

The officer pulled out his taser after talking to the man for 41 seconds and hit him at a little after the one minute mark --- at which point he fell head first out of his seat on to the cement and rolled down several steps. I didn't hear anybody laughing on the soundtrack to this movie. Maybe that's because the sight of a drunk being shot with enough electricity to make him fall out of his chair onto cement stairs just isn't so funny in real life.